Saturday, 12 October 2013

Big Gods for Big Societies

I think there is something scarier than the coming end of the world by
global warming. It is the end of religion (just my Christian bias). And this
religion-slayer comes in a more insidious form nowadays. I’m afraid many may
not even see it coming because it is not your typical in-your-face kind of atheism
that denounces all religion as evil, poisonous, fraudulent, hopeless,
delusional, hypocritical, self-serving, exploitative, brainwashing, chicanery,
violent, perverted, imaginary, baseless, wishful thinking, and oppressive.

People
like Dawkins and Harris wear their anti-religious disgust in their sleeves and
you can spot them miles away. You can even whiff up their feral scent from
afar. But the atheism that I am referring to comes like the Trojan horse of the
Homer’s Iliad, Helen of Troy. I call
it the Trojan Horse Atheism (“THA” in
short and I am using this term arbitrarily to suit the purpose for which I am
writing this article).

THA doesn’t insult your religious sensitivity. It is in fact friendly to
religious rituals, doctrines and practices; almost sympathetic, nurturing, and
apparently encouraging. THA endorses religion as a necessary aspect of what
made us what we are today. Our modern civilization may not even evolve without
religion, so says the THA advocate. The latter’s definition of religion is even
instructive, “Religion is a system of
emotionally binding beliefs and practices in which a society implicitly
negotiates through prayer and sacrifice with supernatural agents, securing from
them commands that compel members, through fear of divine punishment, to
subordinate their interests to the common good.”

Not entirely scripturally
inspired, I know, but the above definition at the very least acknowledges these
familiar religious experiences like “emotionally
binding beliefs and practices”, “prayer
and sacrifice”, “supernatural agents”
and some fear connected to “divine
punishment.” The THA camp can even quote scriptures to warm the believers’
heart, “Nothing in all creation is hidden
from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him
to whom we must give account.” (Hebrews 4:13)

Of course, that scripture has to be put in its proper context. It is
against this foremost principle that the context draws its relevance, “watched people are nice people.” This accounts
for the scriptural passage, “Nothing in
all creation is hidden from God’s sight.” This is also where the THA advocates
reveal their agenda - just in case the die-hard believers are still starry-eyed
about them. They are of the view that religion plays a cultural evolutionary
role on our society. By this, they are saying that religion gives a community
the distinct advantage over the other communities that profess no religion at
all (or believes in a religion whose gods are anti-social, impotent and largely
disinterested in human affairs). But
then, how does it all work?

In the book, Big Gods, the
author and psychology professor Ara Norenzayan writes, “Still, human beings are the only known species that underwent a radical
transformation from small, tight-knit groups (Gemeinschaft, or community) to
large, anonymous societies (Gesellschaft, or civil society), which practice
sustained cooperation towards anonymous genetic strangers on a massive scale…It
turns out that a big force leading from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft was prosocial
religions with Big Gods.”

There you have it: Big Gods made
for Big Societies. The subtlety of this proposition is not in the truth of religion (if not a scientific fact, then a credible one, even plausible) but in using religion as a means to an end. In other words, whether gods
exist or not is not what the THA advocates are interested in. Whether they are personal,
loving or self-sacrificial is besides the point. And I don’t even need to talk
about Calvary, the resurrection and the redemptive blood of Christ. THA proponents
are only intrigued about how religion facilitated man’s purpose and not the
other way round. What is essential to their understanding of religion is that
the latter exists to serve the development of communities from hunter-gatherer
societies with their tribal spirits and deities to modern nation-states with
their monotheistic Abrahamic, Christian and Islamic gods. And who can really fault
their sincerity in studying this religious phenomena, that is, why watched
people are generally nice people, right?

If you think about it, it is not untenable. We humans are
conscious people. Unless you are mental up the wazoo, it is not in your psychological makeup to commit a moral wrong (or a crime) when being watched. Most of us
will behave ourselves when big brother is watching and nothing keeps us – as
believers - on our best behavior as when we are religiously conscious of the presence
of a supernatural watcher in the sky. This is demonstrated, according to the
author, by the Sunday Effect.

In the book (Big Gods), the question asked was, “Do Christians behave better on Sunday? Are they more charitable during
the weekend?” No brownie points for guessing. The result was foregone. In
one social experiment, it is noted, “On
Sundays, appeals to charity were 100 percent more effective for religious
Christian individuals compared to non-religious individuals.” (Deepak Malhotra) In the eyes of THA,
this study and many others confirm how conscious awareness of a supernatural policeman inclines the believers to act in a morally delineated way.

Further, in another study, a researcher, Benjamin Edleman, came to this
finding, “…porn consumption rates in
religious (US) states followed a particular ebb and flow: the rates went down
on Sundays, only to go up again on other days of the week. On average, regular
churchgoers consumed similar amounts of porn as others; however, they abstained
more on Sunday and shifted their porn consumption to other days of the week.” (emphasis mine) Taken at face value, the impression given here is that atheists generally lead
a more open and authentic life than churchgoers.

Although the studies have
their flaws, I cannot deny that the THA advocates have a point about how
religion goes some way to keep its believers on their toes. I guess that is why
media guru Laura Schlesinger said, “it’s
impossible for people to be moral without a belief in God. The fear of God is
what keeps people on the straight and narrow.”

And mind you, it is not just any tom, dick or fairy that fits the bill
of playing the role of the supernatural monitors. The faith of the people in
these gods have to be such that they perceive the divine as omnipresent (this
is obvious), omnipotent (all powerful), and omniscient (all-knowing).

In
addition, all those divinely-accorded traits will not amount to much without this most-delectable finishing touch: Meanness. The gods must flare up by the nostrils occasionally. They have to mean what they say and say what they mean. They must show themselves to
be seriously pissed off with immorality because mean gods, with
peeking-tom-like ability, translates to good people. But how do they enforce the punishment?

Well, this is where hell and heaven comes in. To the author (of Big Gods), the
influence of hell is stronger than the attraction of heaven when it comes to
enforcing good behavior. But this doesn’t mean heaven is redundant. You see,
hell may make people good but it is heaven that makes them feel good. So like
cookies and cream (or heat and light), hell and heaven, as a religious concept
(or meme), can be seen as a double whammy for a believer. The fear of hell keeps
him looking over his shoulder for possible personal condemnation
while the reward of heaven keeps him looking above his shoulder for that heavenly
mansion in the sky or that much-craved-after harem of black-eyed virgins. And
the idea of eternity in heaven and hell is just the icing on the religious cake
for believers to play nice in this life.

From here, the author proceeded with his next point in the cultural
evolution of religion as captured in this phrase, “Trust people who trust God.” I recall a judge once made this passing remark about a local priest convicted of embezzlement, "If you can't trust a priest, who can you trust?" Throughout our history (esp. the last 12,000 years, "the Holocene Epoch"), we have been taught (or programmed to think) that religious leaders are generally beyond reproach. They can readily be trusted. Therefore, no background checks are needed. It is in our hereditary bloodline (I guess this is so because between a man who tells you that he can be trusted and that he has the creator of the universe as his main sponsor and a man who tells you the same thing but you'll just have to take his words for it, no heavenly sponsorship whatsoever, who would you cast your vote for? No brainer right?).

To illustrate this, the author
recounted the dilemma of the travelling salesman. “In 1904, on a long railway journey throughout America, the German
sociologist Max Weber was sitting next to a travelling salesman when the
conversation turned to religion. In a now famous quote, the man said: “Sir, for
my part everybody may believe or not believe as he pleases; but if I saw a
farmer or a businessman not belonging to any church at all, I wouldn’t trust him
with fifty cents. Why pay him, if he doesn’t believe in anything?” This
fifty-cent trust scenario is no different from this question posed in another
way, “If you were strolling down a dark
alley, and a group of rowdy youths were walking towards you, wouldn’t you be
comforted to know that they had just come out of a bible-study session?” (to
which an atheist rebutted, “Well, it
wouldn’t help much if they had just come out of a religious meeting with
remote-triggered bombs strapped up to their chest, wouldn’t it?”).

But the point here is this, and as a matter of perception, religious
people generally makes for better trusting agent than those who profess to no
religion at all. This is strange in modern times I know but it is taken as a
given throughout our evolutionary history (and whether this is a result of
cultural evolution or genetic cognitive god-bias, or both, is something that no
one knows for sure).

However, the author proposes that this may be so because the successful
monotheistic religions that have survived today (that is, Christianity and
Islam for example) empower or endow its believers with a strong element of believability.
This so called believability comes in the form of costly signaling and
extravagant display of loyalty. This is how the author explains it. “For every year considered in a 110 year
span, religious communes were found to outlast secular ones by an average
factor of four. Not surprisingly, religious communes imposed more than twice as
many costly requirements such as food taboos and fasts, than secular ones.
Importantly, the number of costly requirements predicted religious commune
longevity after accounting for population size, income, and year the commune
was founded.”

In other words, major religions in the world impose on its members a
high price for believing and this is manifested in the specific manner they
conduct themselves like the elaborate ritualistic sacrifices, occasional marathon
fasting, all night prayers, tithing and offerings, and even the prevalent
festivities involving body mutilations (like Thaipusam), nail-piercing
reenactments and self-castrations to achieve sexual purity. This believability
adds credence to the belief and to the believers, and this in turn causes many to convert
and to endorse their practices.

You can in fact see it this way. It is basically about working feverishly hard for what you believe in
and the fruits of one’s labor in the self-flagellations and the
self-inflictions demonstrate to the public at large the believability of the
object (or subject) of the devotees’ worship. The secular communes clearly lost out on this
level. They are simply not interested. They do not have an invisible means of support. They are too busy minding their own business to ever care about minding the businesses of the big gods. You can compare a religious practitioner
as someone who launches out a giant blip in the sky with full colors and
lights, and an atheist as a beach vacationer, sipping a slink, and enjoying the
sun, minding his own business. Who do you
think gets the attention (and affection)?

Here's another point to note and it is in what the sociologist Emile Durkheim once called
the “collective effervescence” of
religion, which further strengthens the hold of religion on its members and enlarges
their estate. This collective effervescence is made up of religious worship,
music, dances, their rich culture and history, and their charismatic preaching.
All this only goes to deepen their charm and ensure their growth over the
centuries; thereby making a society with prosocial religion of big gods a formidable
force to reckon with.

And finally, there is no better way of signaling one’s religious
commitment and the believability of one’s faith than martyrdom. The offering of
oneself for his religion is a great billboard advertisement for it. If a picture paints
a thousand words, then a death or two literally hangs the rainbow in the sky
for all to see.

So, when you add the cultural tendency of people to “trust people who
trust God” to the evolutionary tested observation that “watched people are nice
people”, what you get is a fast evolving, culturally adaptive, highly
competitive and religion-driven society that would be fit and selected by nature
to survive and thrive.

Of course, all this begs the following questions. Why is it that atheists cannot be trusted to be good without god? Why is
it that in our ancestral past, before the advent of the enlightenment and
science, a godless community cannot develop into a large-scale, flourishing
society? This is where the author admits that throughout our history,
atheists generally get the short end of the stick. A study was done to see how
an atheist is perceived as compared to a theist and the atheist is generally
seen as less trustworthy.

In the book, many polls were done in America on this
and the trend has been unmistakable. This is what the author observed, “Over time, we see an encouraging patterns of
increasing social acceptance of almost all groups that have been historically
marginalized. In 1948, only 48 percent of Americans said they would be willing
to vote for an African American presidential candidate. By 1999, that number
had almost doubled, to over 90 per cent. True to these numbers, Americans
elected in 2008 the first African American president. Catholics, Jews, women –
in fact, every single group polled, including gays, who only a few decades ago
were excluded by the majority of Americans – have crossed the critical 50
percent mark already in 1999 – except atheists, who even today, cannot garner
the approval of a simple majority. The singling out of atheists is
something that is found repeatedly by pollsters surveying American social
attitudes.” (emphasis mine)

Ironically, atheists shares the same rung of social acceptance (or
rejection) as rapists! This is further compounded by the fact that members of
one religion would rather trust members of another religion than to trust atheists as
a whole. So it seems like believing in a “wrong” god is far better than
believing in no god at all, so remarked the author.

If we put it altogether, the general proposition of the THA advocates is
that a society who believes in a supernatural watcher would thrive because the people
in such society would perform more altruistic acts not just for their kin but
also for their kith and even strangers. Furthermore, they are generally trusted
people and they set the moral example for others to be assimilated into their
fold. This ever expanding circle of goodwill, influence and charity, inspired
by the fear and reward of religion, makes for a stronger, more resilient and
competitive society as against other godless or god-impotent communities.

In
fact, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson wrote, “Groups are acknowledged to evolve into adaptive units, but only if
special conditions are met…in human groups it is often religion that provides
the special conditions. Religion returns to center stage, not as a
theological explanation of purpose or order, but as itself a product of
evolution that enables groups to function as adaptive units – at least to a
degree.” (emphasis mine)

From the perspective of a believer, one cannot help but notice a
difference between the hard-core atheists like Dawkins and Pullman, and the THA
proponents I have just described. At least, for the latter (that is, THA), they
do not rubbish our belief and call us delusional, child-like,
immature, dreamers, fantasy-believers and inhabitants of la-la land. At least,
most of them are more discreet than the hard-core atheists. But I guess the
difference stops there. While the likes of Dawkins will tell you in your face
about what they think about your religion, the THA proponents will give you the
impression that they are for your religion (or religion as a whole) and
everything that your religion stands for, that is, its moral injunctions minus
the invisible old man in the sky. This of course does not make them an instant
fan of your god. In every way, their dealing with the object of your worship is
generally at an emotional arm’s length.

In the last chapter of the book (Big Gods) entitled “Cooperation without God,” the author unveiled a possible future
of religion in the rising tides of secularization, “With the benefit of time, when future
historians look back at the course of human societies, they may see the
prosocial religions as yet another crucial social transition – an intermediate
cultural bridge between the small-scale human societies that dominated much of
our evolutionary history and the complex secular societies emerging in parts of
the modern world. These new institutions and traditions began to erode the
foundations of religions with Big Gods. No doubt this is a complex question,
and strong institutions and material well-being may have passed a threshold, no
longer needing religion to sustain large-scale cooperation. In short:
secular societies climbed the ladder of religion, and then kicked it away.”
(emphasis mine).

As it stands today, numerous developed countries like Canada, France,
Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Australia have already “kicked the ladder
of religion away." This is also where the atavistic gods of old are gradually supplanted by the rule of law, the justice system, secular
government, police and security infrastructure, liberal values, science and
evolution, high per capital income, and a community of educated majority. In
Denmark, for example, one could borrow a bicycle free of charge, use it to
travel to his destination and leave the bicycle at its assigned distribution
center for the next user. When asked whether there is any fear of theft, a Danish
replied, puzzled, “Why would anyone steal
a bicycle if anyone can borrow one?”

Indeed, an atheist-majority country
like Denmark is thriving in communal security and peace as it is “high on cooperation, social cohesion and
public trust.” Mind you, the latter traits used to be what religion does
best, so says the THA supporters.

Having reflected on this particular subtle strain of atheism, here’s the
bombshell on religion as I see it. If
secular societies are really an outgrowth of prosocial religion, then can it be
said that at the end of the rainbow of religion is the stardust of atheism?
The author in fact offered this quote in the book, “Thus, the monotheisms may have inadvertently planted the seeds of
atheism: if people can deny the existence of other gods, it’s only a matter of
time before they start denying the existence of any gods.”Imagine that. The history of religion,
from polytheism to monotheism, is actually the definitive route 66 that
inevitably directs all religious traffic to a cliff overlooking a beautiful sea
burial. Wow, what an ironic twist of
fate, however outrageous it is!

So, I see a new horizon emerging for the future of religion. I see the
end of religion in due course as the world gradually labors under a series of new
birth pangs, that is, universal atheism. The supernatural watchman would thereafter
disappear for good as humanity would no longer need him to watch over them. As
belief in the supernatural dies off, the gods of yesterday would also vanish
into thin air. What is left of us is therefore no different from a man who had just
awaken from a long pixie-dust dream of fairy-tales, elves and nymphs and is
still groggy from the religious effects of a long Rip-Van-Winkle-like sleep. As
he regains his bearings, he would have to face a world without god, a world where
he alone makes meaning of, and a world where he would have to trust that his
neighbors would behave themselves.

If an epilogue is appropriate here, I guess it would be this: Let’s hope that this world would itself be a
fantasy embedded in a dream of an atheist who would soon wake up to the “nightmare”
of a world still controlled by the supernatural. But this time, in this world, it
is not via the fear of punishment that this supernatural creator is inspiring
behaviors of morality and charity. It is through the love at Calvary that
transforms hearts from inside out. One is then tempted to ask: which outcome is
a dream and which is a reality? Mm… I guess the truth is still out there for
some. Cheerz.